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Today, a friend and I were chatting about ION's encrypted Air TV subchannels. Sure enough, I looked today and three of them were unencrypted, including one that looks to be a barker channel. I've attached snapshots.

Pardon me if the information is in one of your links but they were kind of Greek to me Anyway do you know what the resolution of these PPV channels will be? and could they be different(lower res.) when just advertising upcoming events? I suppose a static screen advertising upcoming events wouldn't take much bandwidth but I would think static HD would take more bandwidth than static SD....
If they are HD it will be interesting to see how the regular HD Ion channel will look like, supplied bandwidth etc.

No worries, it wasn't in the links. The ones I've seen have been MPEG-4 SD 528x480i.

Each of the 10 additional channels look to be using about 800 kbps, give or take (variable bitrate). They also removed qubo from the Mobile DTV signal and chopped that bandwidth in half, and have crushed the HD down to about 6 Mbps.

- Trip

N4MJC

Comments are my own and not that of the FCC (my employer) or anyone else.

I imagine a lot of those people over at the "DTV USA Forum" will be in their glory over it, although I doubt if the vast majority here in the HDTV area of this forum are.

I'm sure if you continue the free advertising for them, more will join.

I've been able to confirm the presence of this service in Los Angeles, Dallas, Atlanta, West Palm Beach, Tampa, San Francisco, and Phoenix. I can confirm that it is not present in Seattle, Miami, Nashville, DC, or Roanoke. I've sent out requests for data to New York, Chicago, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, Boston, and Denver.

- Trip

N4MJC

Comments are my own and not that of the FCC (my employer) or anyone else.

How do you know if it's present, do you need to do a channel scan and will it then be tunable? I have ION in my market along with several sub channels but I haven't seen anything new in quite some time.

Shouldn't need to re-scan for new subchannels if the main channel is already seen. They should appear automatically.

That may be receiver dependent. I no longer have my Sony connected directly (wife wanted channels requiring a Charter box), but IIRC, that was true. I have a 22" 720P Vizio (3 years old) in my office, and each sub has to be found in the scan ... and the whole thing has to be scanned at one time ... no "add" at all. It was cheap .... and the PQ is quite sufficient for my wants.

Different than OTA.
For OTA, a new scan should not be needed. A DTV tuner should automatically add subchannels as available.

My Sony Bravia TV does not pick up nor display those subchannels when I rescan. However, if I manually enter one of those subchannels, I get a blank screen (since it is in mpeg4 format) with the name of the subchannel displayed.

My TVs with DTV tuners will automatically pick up new subchannels, however it does not pick up the new Air Box subchannels, as they are MPEG-4. I use TS Reader with VLC Media Player in order to decode the three unencrypted subchannels.

The extra ION subchannels were showing up on WCPX in Chicago Monday. When I rescanned RF43 with the DTVPal DVR, it showed three "services" already known (of course: ION on 38.1, qubo on 38.2, and IonLife on 38.3), thirteen found, and none added. It may be worth noting that the DTVPal DVR does not count WTTW's update channels on 47-7 and 47-8 as "services," not even as services not to be added.

it is possible that it is: DVB-T or ISDB-T used in other countries.
it may be DTV for cell phones/pads.
my tuner can decode only ATSC/8-VSB but DVB tuners are in Europe and ISDB are in Brazil.
there was also mention of DVB-SH in a article.maybe we should pay more attention to our
gov. telecommunication meetings............

This Airbox thing is driving me nuts. I pick up the pay channels (blanked out) on my Iview 3500 STB.

Nine Channels/sub-channels total on that frequency assignment. Six normal, three scrambled. Regularly updated EPG info for Starz. Mere "Redzone" or "Airbox" EPG designations for the other two. This scheme has been hanging in the balance for years now. If some of the channels are scrambled, how can an Mpeg4 stream be made all that secure?

ION has three shopping channels.

Wednesday night Main Event wrestling is the ONLY thing on all those channels that I watch (and even that shows up thursdays on Hulu)... Being able to decode Starz would ease some of the frustration.

Is this service still available in Atlanta? I live in Chattanooga but pick up ION from here. I am wondering how I could get a box and subscribe. Their website never works for me, even if I VPN from a server in a city that does have Airbox.

I know in a number of markets where Ion Media has stations, they dropped Airbox from their bandwidth, because the service was never launched. Instead, they decided to add HSN & QVC OTA to their bandwidth, & must be making money from it. I forgot when it was that Airbox was removed from WCPX Chicago, but I know it was either earlier this year, or late last year.